Dr. John Wiktorowicz has been a protein biochemist for over 35 years. He is the Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas. Dr. Wiktorowicz is the Director of the Proteomics Section of the Biomolecular Resource Facility at UTMB, the flagship institution for the University of Texas System Proteomics Core Network for all 16 UT institutions. He serves as the Director of Innovative Technologies for the NHLBI Proteomics Center for Airway Inflammation, and Director of Discovery Proteomics for the NIAID Clinical Proteomics Center. He also holds the positions of Senior Scientist for the Sealy Center for Molecular Medicine and the Institute for Infection and Immunity. His main research interest is to develop new proteomics technologies to address the many challenges imposed by proteomics and to apply them to the outstanding issues in human disease.

He received his BS in Biology from the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, Il, and Ph.D. in Human Biological Chemistry and Genetics from the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston TX. He completed his post-doctoral academic training in the Division of Biology at Caltech in Pasadena, CA as a Damon Runyon Fellow, followed by a research fellowship in the Department of Cellular Biology at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, CA.

Dr. Michael Tiemeyer

Dr. Michael Tiemeyer has been working in the field of glycobiology for the last three decades, with an emphasis on glycomics and glycoproteomics for the last 10 years. He is currently serving as a Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and as the Associate Director for Research at the Complex Carbohydrate Research Center (CCRC), University of Georgia. His current research focuses on mechanisms that regulate the expression, function, and structure of tissue-specific glycans. His works have been published in various journals of repute. He is actively involved in advancing glycomics research by developing workflows, tools, and analytic methods for basic research and for biomedical applications.

Dr. Tiemeyer received his B.A. in biology in 1982 from The Johns Hopkins University and his Ph.D. in neuroscience in 1989 from The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He was a Helen Hay Whitney postdoctoral fellow in developmental neurobiology at the University of California at Berkeley. Prior to joining CCRC, Dr. Tiemeyer was on the faculty in the Department of Cell Biology at Yale University School of Medicine and directed biochemical and clinical analytics and new methods development at Glyko (now BioMarin), Inc.

Dr. Gregory Shipley

Dr. Gregory Shipley brings in over two decades of experience in designing assays and performing real-time qPCR analyses on nucleic acids. He is an internationally recognized authority on issues relating to qPCR. Dr. Shipley completed his doctoral thesis in Cellular and Organismal Biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1978 after which he moved to University of Florida in Gainesville and then on to MIT as an NIH post-doctoral fellow to continue his postdoctoral training.

Following academic appointments at Texas A&M University, the University of Houston, Dr. Shipley moved to the University of Texas Health Science Center-Houston Medical School in 1990 where he carried out projects centered on retinoids and non-steroidal nuclear receptors. He served as the Director of the Quantitative Genomics Core Laboratory until he retired 2012. He now offers consulting services for assay design, workflow, MIQE compliance and applying automation to qPCR through his company, Shipley Consulting, LLC. During this tenure, Dr. Shipley supervised the setup, running and analyses of all real time qPCR and high resolution melt assays utilizing automation. He is also one of the key authors of the MIQE guidelines.